The present invention relates to a game assembly, and more particularly to a board game that involves abstract strategy pattern building for competition between two or more players.
For centuries board games have been an extremely popular form of entertainment for people of all ages. These types of games have been designed both for a single player and for competition between two or more players. Many games, such as Yahtzee™, mainly involve chance. Many games, such as backgammon, involve a combination of chance and skill, and many games, such as chess, mainly involve skill.
The present invention relates to games of skill that involve a competition between two or more players to build a desired pattern on the game board while preventing the other players from building the desired pattern. Popular games of this genre include Pente, gomoku, renju, and Milton Bradley's™ Score Four™.
Since 1974, the genre of pattern building games has included the very popular game of Connect Four™, a game also published by Milton Bradley™. A much older version of Connect Four™ is known as “The Captain's Mistress”.
Connect Four™ is a two player game in which the players take turns dropping alternating colored discs into a seven column, six row vertically suspended matrix. The object of the game is to connect four singly-colored discs in a row, vertically, horizontally, or diagonally, before one's opponent can do likewise. Connect Four™ was created for players age seven and older and has an expected playing time of ten minutes. However, Connect Four™ is limited because only two players can play, because the suspended matrix only allows a player to insert the colored discs into a single plane, and because only one type of disc is used. Consequently, the difficulty and the enjoyment of the game are limited.
An abstract strategy pattern building game having a vertically suspended matrix that allows game pieces to be dropped into multiple planes, that uses varying types of game pieces, and that allows for more than two players is unknown in the prior art. Accordingly, it would be desirable to create a game that presents a variation in the aforementioned variables because the difficulty and the level of enjoyment of such a game would increase. The invention discussed in connection with the described embodiment addresses these and other deficiencies of the prior art.
The features and advantages of the present invention will be explained in or apparent from the following description of the preferred embodiment considered together with the accompanying drawings.